Chapter 29 - Toushi

The River Woman studied the pattern of the pieces which lay to the south of Edo in the province of Mikawa. Earlier developments had enabled the young Tokugawa Ieyasu to rise from hostage of the rival Imagawa clan to leader of his own. She had encouraged him to accept Oda Nobunaga as his ally and overlord. She softly fed his great patience, advising him there was more to be gained in watchful waiting than in being the chief right now. Let others lead the fights and attract the ire of the daimyo. Still, he could not become too passive, people must remember he was a force to reckon with.

The Ikko-ikki temple-fortress, Azukizaka, based in Mikawa was becoming restive, preparing a push for self-rule that would fracture the province once again into a cluster of warring hotspots. As Ieyasu assembled an army to quash the nascent rebellion, the River Woman placed a couple more markers in the region, gently undermining the solidarity of the Ikko-ikki.

The Tokugawas were able to move during the moment of schism and expel the Ikko-ikki from their temple. Several transparent pieces flared to life, completing an enclosure of the region. The River Woman gathered in her opponent's pieces and claimed Mikawa.

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The cluster of young monks stood at the edge of the temple's support town and watched Azukizaka Hoganji burn. It had been a near thing, their escape. Even now, shrouded by the night's darkness, they could not be sure of remaining unobserved for long. The steady roar of the fire held them transfixed, flames licked and danced along the great timbers and sparks tumbled and swirled away into the night to become one with the distant stars.

"All is suffering," Shinjinbukaimaru quoted softly as they watched their home and safe haven drift away on the smoke.

Shiniri twitched, stung. How could it be? Amida Buddha was the one true God. They were his children, the people sworn to his word. How could such things happen to the faithful?

The kami of Shiniri's village had not been strong enough to protect it from the ravages of a border dispute between two squabbling warlords, so he had fled the destruction. He thought he had found a haven here. It had seemed so safe, so strong. Azukizaka was so big that surely no daimyo could destroy it. And surely, Amida Buddha's protection was on them.

Shiniri looked around at his fellow student monks. Gentle Akimi, who gazed forlornly, crying, as the temple's great beams collapsed in a roar of crackling sparks, Fujio, white-faced and stricken as he obsessively prayed his way around a rosary over and over without ever knowing what he was doing, Shinjinbukaimaru, who had survived the great fire at Ishigama Hoganji and was now turning away from the fire to calmly direct a frightened clerk with the temple's records to where he might find such of the senior clergy as had survived.

Shinjinbukaimaru was well respected among the student monks. He always seemed to understand the sutras. He had a graceful acceptance of life's troubles, nothing seemed to perturb him.

" Shinjinbukaimaru, how did this come to be?" Shiniri asked. "We have served Amida Buddha well. We offered prayers, celebrating his glory and extolling his peace. Azukizaka Hoganji cared for all his people in these lands. Surely we are not deserving of this fate."

"All is suffering," Shinjinbukaimaru repeated. "The gods strive toward unknown goals and sometimes we small ones find ourselves standing in the way. It has nothing to do with our virtue. We pick it up and begin again, elsewhere if we must."

Was that all Shinjinbukaimaru had to offer? Philosophical words on the nature of fate? Where was the solution? How could Shiniri keep this from happening to him again? The problem was not with the beneficence and power of Amida Buddha, it lay in the gelded attitude of the priests. He, for one, was not going to sit still and take it.

"Is there no solution?" Shiniri's words were humble, respectful, but his voice was sharp with accusation, with disgust at inaction. "How does one escape from this endless persecution? I was driven from my village, my family slaughtered. I came here, to a great Hoganji, seeking only peace and am once more driven forth. Does Amida have no answer?"

Shinjinbukaimaru looked long at Shiniri, then said quietly, "There is Nirvana. It is the only way out."

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As the dust settled in Mikawa the River Woman returned to monitoring developments around her anchor.

The serene blue knotted ball that orbited the main piece had become tantalizingly active lately. The knot loosened and writhed on occasion, most often after a lightening strike from her brother's cloud. Red glowed from the depths of the knot in brief volcanic flares, smoke puffed out between the loosened loops of the knot. The River Woman watched avidly, convinced that she knew what was encased in that knot, if she could just grasp the right clue.

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Shortly after New Year, Sakura started crawling, once again ramping up the level of chaos in the InuYasha household by several notches. She was just as intrepid an explorer as her brother had been, but there were some very telling differences in style. Where Tsuchiya moved restlessly from place to place, never staying long in one location, Sakura got caught up in things she found in her path, often spending hours exploring all facets of the thing she had found. This did not necessarily make Kagome's life any easier; Sakura was at least as capable of driving her crazy as Tsuchiya had been. The day she spent exploring all the different sounds that could be made by banging together kitchen implements would live long in Kagome's memory, as would the day she somehow managed to get into the miso pot and massaged miso into the bamboo steamer lids, herself, and everything else she could reach with a dedication that Tsuchiya had never been able to muster, creating an epic and very smelly mess that took days to scrub clean.

Her newfound mobility also meant that Sakura and Tsuchiya were now very much in each other's hair. In the manner of younger siblings everywhere, Sakura followed Tsuchiya everywhere he went, and in the manner of older siblings everywhere, Tsuchiya deeply resented it.

Any time Tsuchiya actually did settle down for a few minutes to play with something, it was not long before Sakura was right in the middle of it, grabbing and inspecting the pieces or putting a critical piece in her mouth. Tsuchiya's automatic response was to snatch the piece back and shove Sakura roughly aside. Sakura was still too little to understand his annoyance and Tsuchiya was still too little to have much impulse control. There were days when Kagome could swear the only thing she had done all day was continually pry the two of them apart.

InuYasha still took Sakura out on morning excursions most days, giving Kagome at least a hope of getting something useful done in a day. Shippo was usually amenable to taking Tsuchiya out for some serious boy play. And Kagome and Sango swapped turns about once a week, one of them minding all of the kids for a day while the other did a major catch-up swoop on the derelict chores. Even so, visits to Mama for a full-body recharge were still required on a regular basis.

Mama, especially, loved these times with her grandchildren, and she lavished them with puzzles, books, building blocks and crayons. She and Sota would spend hours reading stories and working puzzles with them. Sota built great towers of blocks for Tsuchiya to knock over. Grampa liked to take Sakura and draw pictures for her while he told her stories of all the old legends.

Life progressed in this vein for the next several months as the children grew, each becoming stronger, faster, more agile and each finding more ways to annoy each other.

What had started as accidental nudgings and innocent misunderstandings gradually developed into actively managed campaigns of aggression. Tsuchiya was more blatant about it. He shoved Sakura over, ordered her around and snatched her toys away. Sakura, by no means always innocent, became an expert at timing her howls of protest for just that moment in time when InuYasha could hear her but had not been able to see what led up to the fuss. Still, it was hard to deny that Tsuchiya was doing the bulk of the bullying.

Kagome and InuYasha found themselves in opposing camps when it came to handling the situation. Kagome tried to insist that Tsuchiya express his annoyance in gentler ways, but she remembered just how provoking a younger sibling could be. InuYasha, still stinging from the way Sesshomaru had always treated him, was firmly in Sakura's camp.

It was shortly after harvest, during a visit to Mama's house, that it all came to a head. Sakura, now eighteen months old, had the building blocks laid out on the living room floor. She had spent the better part of an hour sorting them into piles, first by color, then by shape, and now she had them neatly arranged from small to large. Inuyasha was flopped down beside her, commenting on what she was doing and naming the colors and shapes as she went.

She was happily surveying the results of her work when Tsuchiya galloped into the room, jumped right into the middle of her carefully constructed array, kicked the blocks everywhere in a joyful clatter, then bounded off to bounce on the couch a few times before he plopped down to bother Sota while he did his homework.

Sakura stared at her ruined array, seething. This time, however, she did not burst out crying. This time, her little jaw clenched in fury, she climbed to her feet, picked up the biggest, longest block in the set, marched purposefully up to Tsuchiya and whacked him over the head with it as hard as she could. This time, it was Tsuchiya who screamed in shock and outrage.

He was doubly shocked when his father had very little sympathy for him.

"You've had it coming for months," he told his son. "She finally got sick of you bullying her and decided to do something about it."

Tsuchiya wasn't going to take that. He was the nii-chan and she was the imouto-chan. He launched himself at his sister, snarling, intent on putting her in her place. She wasn't about to give an inch, fierce determination making up for her smaller size.

Kagome was appalled. All that work she had been putting in to teach her children peaceful conflict resolution evaporated before her eyes in a puff of superheated steam. Futilely, she tried to pull them apart and impose peace, receiving several nasty scratches in the process.

InuYasha could not have been prouder of his little "Toushi", his little "Fighting Spirit". It was a blow for the little guy, a clear warning that they were not just going to let the big kid win. All those shots he would dearly have loved to have landed on Sesshomaru passed through his mind as he cheered his little girl on. He never called her "Sakura" again.

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Tsuchiya's cloud scored another direct hit on his sister's blue knot.

Slowly, then with building speed and violence, the knot quivered, writhed, then loosened in a great puff of smoke. A blast of red fire shot from the heart of the knot, then it unraveled smoothly, spinning and twisting, to reveal a tiny blue dragon, golden eyes glowing with ire as it gathered into a crouch and launched itself after the cloud in a parody of the myth of the Celestial Dragon pursuing the Pearl of Wisdom through the Sky.

The River Woman gasped in mingled horror and delight. A dragon, and an aroused one at that! How could she have missed that? She sat back on her heels, thinking furiously. That particular shade of teal was peculiar to sea dragons. Had old Ryuujin decided to make his play thus, in retaliation for the meddling in the Coral Palace? She would have to visit the Coral Palace, see what she could tease out of that cagey old man.

Still, she now had at her disposal a child with steadfast determination, great courage and a powerful mind, supple, subtle, capable of great depth and penetrating focus. This could be a powerful tool, assuming she could manage to direct the young dragon-soul. Dragons were notoriously headstrong.

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